Through It, Not Over It: On Anger

I’m at my therapist’s office, the same one as a year ago when I was working through losing my twin boys at 20 weeks.

Now I’m here for them and my son, who died at three weeks old in August.

She’s going through my assessment, a weekly checkup to see where I am emotionally.

I can hear myself say, “And angry. I feel furious, all the time. Mostly just angry.”

It’s added onto everything.

She pauses at the end and says, “I see this time around a lot of anger – much more than the profound sadness that seemed to encompass you before Christmas.”

I nod, feeling terrible that I can’t seem to find a less, well, angry feeling.

“I feel angry that I don’t have a 5-month-old, that I don’t have my 18-month-olds. I’m mad that everyone else gets their baby.

I’m mad about everything to do with this. I can’t be happy for anyone; I feel cheated out of the life that so many others take for granted.

And I hate that. I hate being this way, feeling like this. It’s overwhelming, and I do not want to be this person. I am trying so hard to pull out of this because it feels like a huge weight that I can’t carry.

It affects everything.”

I fully expect her to tell me that we need to work on the anger, which is only a symptom of other feelings.

That I should focus on being sad, or how it feels to see my friends bring home healthy babies.

“You need to be angry. You need to stop trying to find a way around the anger, or eventually, you’re going to come to a point in life where it comes out in another moment, and you’ll have to deal with it then.

If you can’t let yourself be angry and work on validating these feelings – you’ll get stuck on repeat here. We need to go through it, not over it.”

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About Diana Stone

Diana is owner and editor-in-chief of Still Standing Magazine and blogs her own life story at Diana Wrote. She and her military retired husband have two girls and three sons who passed away after birth; Preston and Julian, identical twin boys who were born at 20 weeks, and Kaden, who unexpectedly had cardiomyopathy due to a rare virus called ciHHV-6. He died in her arms at 3 weeks old.

In 2014 she traveled with World Vision to learn about maternal health and infant mortality in Zimbabwe, and is now working on her Master's in Mental Health Counseling. You can also find her work on Babble, Liberating Working Moms, She Reads Truth, The New York Times, and The Huffington Post.